A SAN is a dedicated network that provides access to data storage. SANs are typically used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, accessible to servers so that the devices appear as locally attached devices to the operating system. SANs often utilize a fibre channel fabric topology, an infrastructure specially designed to handle storage communications. A typical fibre channel SAN fabric is made up of a number of fibre channel switches.
One difficulty in working with SANs is that a SAN switch developed by one manufacturer may not easily inter-operate with a SAN switch of another manufacturer. The lack of inter-operability can limit options in designing SANs, in particular, at the edge of a SAN. One technique for enabling interoperability between an edge switch of one vendor and a core switch of another vendor involves utilizing an N-port virtualizer (NPV) in an edge switch. For example, an NPV edge device may be connected to a core switch, and a computing device and storage device may be positioned behind the NPV device. The computing device and the storage device may communicate with each other via the NPV edge device and the core switch. The core switch may keep a record of all computing devices that the NPV device can communicate with. Data traffic between the computing device and the storage device must traverse an uplink between the NPV device and the core switch. All switching functionality is provided by the core switch. For this reason, significant latency delays can result. For at least this reason, there is a need for improved techniques for managing data traffic flow in SAN environments.